Baby Audio has a giveaway of an effect from their collaboration with Andrew Huang, Transit 2. Warp is just that module – Speed, and time-independent pitch (Stretch) – for free.
This is the latest in a long, long string of Baby Audio freebies. Now, funny enough, I regularly grab the light/free editions, having installed them all for you, dear readers. It’s the difference between that one Philips-head mini screwdriver you keep on your desk and the full case, right? (I have the same feeling with Soundtoys’ EchoBoy Jr, which gets about as much usage as its bigger sibling.)
The confusing thing here is renaming pitch “Stretch” – that is, pitch variation alone without time stretching, and set to 50% you’ll get just the time manipulation of Speed without the pitch variation. But wait – why isn’t that just called “Pitch”? Baby Audio responds:
The Stretch control is intended to let you compensate for adjustments to the Speed control which is a vari-speed-style time stretch.
However, you’ll notice that if the speed parameter hasn’t been altered, the stretch is inactive, so it’s not a strictly independent pitch shift.
It has some particularly interesting behaviour at extreme settings, for example if the speed is at low values and the stretch is at high values, the buffer becomes too small so it simply loops into a cascading tone with variable pitch controlled by the stretch control. It can get pretty chaotic!
But this is a really great-sounding algorithm, and if you prefer building your effects in your DAW’s own macro system (like Ableton Live Effect Racks), this is also a no-brainer, drop-in, high-fidelity warping stretch/repitch effect with easily assignable knobs. I was already using Warp a lot in the update – see my review with free downloadable presets below. What I liked about Transit 2 was that it was more live live performance friendly.
Free download (of all the free stuff they’ve got):
And I’ve covered the other freebies before:
This also means if I want to be a completionist, I guess I need to do a sequel to this: